10. “Natural Born Killers” (1994)
Stone’s serial-killer film is his most kaleidoscopically strange; a savage, of-the-moment takedown of the mass media’s fascination with true-life killers —contextualizing it amidst O.J. Simpson, the Menendez Brothers, and the serial killer trading cards popular at the time doesn’t make the movie any less bonkers. It should have been a revelatory experience, especially when you factor in its A-list cast (including Robert Downey Jr., who for some reason shows off an Australian accent) and its bold visual experimentation. But as it turned out, Stone was so hyped up on the movie’s oversized too-much-ness that he forgot to, you know, tell a story. Very loosely based on a script by Quentin Tarantino and starring Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as a pair of star-crossed spree killers, the film encompasses flashes of unforgettable mordant insight, like the laugh-track sitcom flashbacks with Rodney Dangerfield as Lewis’ pedophile father, as well as inexplicable embellishments like the rear projection of a Pegasus. What any of it means seems beside the point: this was Stone going for a mood more than a movie, a fever-dream of the American climate at the time, and while it does not at all hang together or hold up to the passage of time, it’s valuable for a glimpse of Stone at his most frenzied, giving out sparks as well as hot air.
9. “W.” (2008)
The most striking thing about “W.” is what it isn’t. After the embellishments and elan of “JFK” and “Nixon,” the third film in his unofficial “president trilogy” feels positively square. Straightforwardly told and edited, the story of one of history’s most reviled presidents, the war-startin’, election-stealin’, torture-endorsin’, grammar-ignorin’ George W. Bush (Josh Brolin) plays more like a mundane human drama than the toothsome takedown you might have expected. Part of this has to do with the tremendous humanity that the excellent Brolin somehow brings to the role, but a lot of it is a symptom of the movie’s production being really rushed. Perhaps there’s another definitive director’s cut somewhere in here, one with all the flourishes and pizzazz you’d expect, but we’re stuck instead with this half-formed film, which while not without its pleasures (like seeing Richard Dreyfuss mumble his way through a Dick Cheney impression), doesn’t yield anything of real substance at the end. Even a little more distance (and maybe the looming threat of a far more unapologetic demagogue as POTUS) would have helped, but 2008 felt just too soon to be able to define the 43rd president’s place in history, despite a terrific central turn.
8. “Heaven & Earth” (1993)
Not known for showcasing strong central female characters in his movies, nor for being that preoccupied with various foreign enemies of the U.S. (preferring to locate the good/evil dichotomy within the American ranks), Stone went for something different in “Heaven and Earth.” A searingly melodramatic look at the Vietnam war through the eyes of a Vietnamese woman, it may be the weakest of his three Vietnam films overall, but it’s not without its merits, and though it was unfairly dismissed at the time, it’s aged relatively well. “Heaven and Earth” tells the true story of Le Ly (an excellent Hiep Thi Li), a Vietnamese woman who, separated from her family by the war, meets and marries a seemingly nice, caring U.S. soldier played by Tommy Lee Jones in one of his customarily intense performances. He takes her home, only to be confronted by repressed battlefield demons. “Heaven and Earth” lacks his customary focus, but as always, it’s ambitious and sincere. And Robert Richardson’s stunning cinematography lends a genuinely epic scope, while a more intimate script from Stone also makes it a shame that this more sedate film has all but been lost in the shuffle.
7. “Salvador” (1986)
Given Stone’s perpetual indignation at American imperialism in the 20th century, it’s no surprise that so early on in his career he zeroed in on Central America, and more specifically the violent civil war in El Salvador that raged from 1980 through 1992, protracted in no small part due to the meddling of the U.S. government and military. Made while that conflict was still ongoing and seen through the eyes of a downtrodden, irresponsible American photographer (James Woods), the film tracks the hack as he travels to San Salvador with his equally dubious friend (Jim Belushi) in hopes of reviving his career. But caught between leftist guerrillas and the right wing military, he fails to find the Robert Capa-style romance of war photography and is faced with only the ugliness of war. While not as overt a polemic as some later titles, “Salvador” is not exactly subtle, and Stone’s leftist sympathies would have been better served had the dialogue been less on-the-nose: as valid as his concerns about U.S. hegemony and the threat of a second Vietnam were, the diatribes are so stilted as to lose impact. Still, while dated, “Salvador” remains a respectably entertaining piece of work, featuring a definitively sweaty Woods.
6. “Platoon” (1986)
The past is another country; they do things differently there —like give Oscars to Oliver Stone, or cast Charlie Sheen as a bookish innocent. This makes rewatching “Platoon” today an unintentionally poignant experience. It’s not a bad film —for craft and performances, it’s one of Stone’s best— but common attitudes toward war have undergone such a philosophical revolution in the intervening years as to make its message anachronistic, if not irrelevant. That Stone transposes the good vs. evil axis away from the U.S. vs. The Enemy, and towards the internal struggle of mentality and ethos between martyr Elias (Willem Dafoe) and his pot-smoking followers, and the treacherous Barnes (Tom Berenger) with his cadre of murderers and rapists, may have seemed like progress at the time, but in so doing, he ascribes every virtue of nobility to the former, and every cruelty to the latter. So all he has really done is switch one bogeyman for another. These simplistic dichotomies do the film no favors in these muddier moral times; for better or worse, the world and its wars have moved on, and “Platoon,” though well-made and intermittently affecting, has been left behind like a buried artifact, its interest now mostly archaeological.
